hmmmm. i don't know. :(

it's been popping up on my posts lately.

I decided to use Skype to try and talk to Iranians first hand last night. I would randomly call them and talked to 4 or 5 people in Tehran and in other parts of Iran for a good while. Many were eager to share information. Among other things things they all said that they really do feel a revolution is on hand, and they think the protests will last (all were Mousavi supported, I tried, but unsuccessfully located an Ahmadenijad supporter). It was 9:10 AM in Iran and the rallies were already beginning. They also said that while it was reported that there was one official death, there were really multiple casualties. This is really becoming an information war. SMS is down, phone service is very weak, internet is very slow, and most websites are shut down, even western news sources like CNN and BBC. One interesting thing that happened was that one person accused me of being "one of them," because apparently the bisaaj and the government are tracking IPs and trying to identify revolutionaries. I showed him my aryan looking face on webcam, and all was well. Anyways, just thought it was interesting and cool that if you want to talk to some people first hand, in the middle of a revolution, you can hop on Skype and give people a call (what a world we live in today). Surprised some news agencies haven't picked up on this handy tool for eyewitness reports and used it instead of speculating.

Looks like it might be something with your Firefox.

That's neat!

that's frigging awesome. not knowing anything about skype - how did you find those people?

Is Grand Ayatollah Montazeri really Martin Scorcese?

You can search users by country. After that you have to try to find someone who will accept your call. I just had another nice, 30 minute conversation with another Iranian. He told me that things are a bit calmer today, but the rallies are going on. They are doing a "recount," but how can anyone trust a recount when it is conducted by the same people? Like in the pictures, he once too was a student and said that once he and the students were demonstrating against the poor quality of food in the University, and the bisaaj came in with plain clothes, tricked them into allowing them access to the dormitories, and attacked them. Amazing stuff you will learn if you chat to people from around the globe on Skype. Becoming a great and educational hobby.

Of course, just like calling anyone else randomly you have no way of knowing how much bullshit you're being fed nor what agenda the person on the other end might have.

aaaah

this is very true. it's much like any interaction with any other human being in that regard - and why i try to minimize my interactions with other human beings in general.

A couple of points are in order here I think
1) We have something majorly in common there
2) I'd put the over/under on somehow pointing out the dichotomy of us both saying that while posting of our own free will on an internet message board at about 7.

Naturally we both understand the distinction about point two but unless they're warded off by my prediction, you know someone will do it.

:lol:

Very true. Then again, I might have overstated my desire to avoid interaction with other human beings slightly. Or perhaps I should modify it to say "avoid extraneous interaction" or "avoid interaction with those that are not immediate family or on the short-list of 5 approved friends whenever possible" or something. Although I guess that's not to say that I wouldn't ever - I did meet up with Lathum multiple times, and AlanT and his wife once, so it's not like I'll NEVER socialize - it's just not something I'm comfortable doing or that I will do more than ohhh...maybe once a month.

And I think more people than you give them credit for would understand the distinction that we draw and the way in that we don't consider this "interaction" because it's completely under-our-control and through an intermediary.

In real life if somebody corners you, you are stuck. On the internet if somebody corners you, you can just pretend that you walked away until you're ready to deal with it or it passes.

Twitter reports are coming in stating that opposition crowds are moving in on the TV/radio station. Details are still sketchy at this point.

I'd venture to guess that statistically youre more likely to hit a Mousavi supporter on Skype than the pro gov't. simply based on advanced technology usage amongst the supporters.

Warning: This is NOT for the faint of heart. It's a video of a protester following a stabbing.

YouTube - koshte esfahan 25 3 88

Interesting new info from Huffington Post via CNN blog. U.S. State Department is working with Twitter to make sure communication lines remain open for opposition.

Anderson Cooper 360: Blog Archive - State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming « - Blogs from CNN.com

And when he says a video of a protestor being stabbed to death, he means a video of an Iranian man with some sort of unknown injury that has him bleeding from the mouth and seemingly unconscious while a bunch of people are crowded around and seemingly (by my perception) trying to find a way to help him.

dunno why the state department is getting involved. that can only be a negative. twitter was doing just fine keeping the tweets flowing out of Iran beforehand, and it was to their benefit to do so, as it was raising their global profile. but now you're just giving the hard-liners in Iran a reason to portray it as us meddling.

bbc.co.uk went green

They aren't meddling. They specifically note that they haven't communicated with anyone to get any information. They only are ensuring that the open communication between each other and the outside world can continue. It's a small, but significant clarification.

wouldn't it be better if they just kept quiet though is my point - instead of giving the iranian hard-liners any ammo

Again MBBF posts some new "fact", has "evidence" to "support" it, is called out that it is just completely false, and ignores being called out.

I love it.

I posted exactly what was posted on the NIAC blog. They said it was a stabbing victim. My apologies that the death wasn't portrayed exactly as advertised. I suppose it's more important to mock MBBF than to recognize the significance of this man's death on video. If so, have at it.

Oh, this old excuse from you again...

If you have a source that actually explains what this is, it seems wise to post that when you post the video. The video has no context and does not portray what is going on.

It is horrible, but part of what frustrates me as I follow this is the vast amounts of just completely false information getting passed around. The internet is a dangerous thing imo. When people start believing just anything posted here, as they seem to do more and more these days, that leads us down to a dangerous path.

I was following the twitter stuff a bit yesterday. I had to stop. It was full of just complete rampant speculation.

That's why I use here. But now this is twice that you have posted media that supposedly is one thing, but clearly appears to be something different. I want information on this situation - but I want it to be credible. I'll take delayed, accurately news over swift, flawed news any day.

Dola: And the goal is not to mock you. The goal is to hopefully have you be a more responsible poster so that your passion can actually be useful rather than a bunch of BS like it is now.

I've been talking to a lot of different people from around the globe in the past few years (mostly for work). My programmer is originally from Pakistan (moved 6 months ago to the UK) and it is always fascinating to here him talk. Nothing like the stereotypes our media has for people in these countries. He's educated and up-to-date on the news of the world. Was actually a journalist at one time but had his life threatened when he wrote a negative piece about some local politicians.

Despite the issues our country has, we sometimes forget how awesome we have it.

John Judis echoes my concerns:

The media has been absolutely horrible for this. CNN is the only one I know of that has anyone on the ground in Iran and their reporting still didn't get the attention that an event like this deserves. Fox News had more space on their homepage dedicated to David Letterman than this. The blogs and Twitter may not always be reliable, but they are pulling out more information from this than any so-called journalists.

To be honest though, I question the wisdom of any organization putting people on the ground in situations like this.

Risk/reward on that is really out of whack afaic, and I say that as a former journalist who would almost certainly have jumped at a chance like that. But that's seems like a combination of bravado, lack of appreciation of one's own mortality, & a grossly overinflated sense of self-importance. If you can disseminate reasonably reliable information without putting a bullseye on the forehead of a reporter, by all means do so.

I believe they had someone there to report on the election before this took place. It's Amanpour so I'm guessing she blends in a little better than most Western journalists. Journalists will always put themselves in danger to report on stories. It's an unfortunate occurence but part of the job.

They also don't need boots on the ground to get the story. I'm also critical of the lack of attention this is receiving. I mean when a joke Letterman made is getting more attention than a public uproar in one of the most powerful countries in the Middle East, it should be bigger news.

Actually, the treason comments in the past involved military actions we were a part of, not a revolution going on in a different country.

Fair enough, I thought that was part of what you meant to criticize (as opposed to just being a phrasing).


I think that's a certain amount of reality setting in. Reality is that there's little the viewing public expects us (at the nation/governmental level) to do to genuinely have an influence in Iran and that by & large the viewing public gives less than two shits what ultimately happens there as at most it's the better of two bad choices and the difference in the impact on American lives is likely to be marginal.

I mean, look at the tenor of our own following of it in this thread. Surely I'm not the only person who picked up on the whole spectator sport vibe of it. I'm not criticizing really, I'm just saying that a lot of our own discussion (and we're actually ahead of the general population in terms of being able to have reasonably intelligent conversation about it) reminded me of threads about at least World Cup qualifiers or something. It was interesting to a point & we'll keep up with it to avoid dealing with our own mundane personal routines but it wasn't really life-changing like an FSU-Miami game or OU-Texas or Cowboys-Redskins.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if you want to rail against something, rail against our society or whatever, just seems unreasonable to blame the media for trying to give people info (or gossip or coverage or whatever) about things they find most interesting.

I understand that part, but most of the news doesn't have an effect on me. I mean if someone raises my taxes, that's big news. But what I see on TV news now is Heidi and Spencer. That shit has no impact on me either. At least with Iran I'm witnessing something that could potentially be in the history books someday.

I think it's just the sad realization I'm coming to that most people care more about what Paris Hilton had for lunch than what is going on in the world. All it's going to take now is a pretty white girl to go missing before this story gets thrown on the back burners.

Okay, I get where you're coming from then. The difference there I think is that I reached that conclusion a loooong time ago (oddly enough while working my ass off as a radio news director).

I don't think that's odd - I bet you learnt the hard way that an injury to Georgia's 3rd string RB was probably more in line with most of your audience's information desires than those darn-fancy foreigners. :D

Actually, I discovered that charity bake sales & obituaries were of far greater interest than local politics, corruption, or even tax increases.

I think the "problem" with the MSM is that the "educated" public has moved online. These educated individuals are using less main-stream sources for their news and thus the mainstream audience gets exponentially dumber. And as the MSM gets dumber, the educated stop going to them for news and the cycle gets worse.

Two big developments overnight as blogged on Huffington Post. Emergency meeting of Assembly of Experts is called. Also, reports are leaking out that military may not be cracking down on protesters. It appears the religious police are the main ones provoking violence at this point...........

If they are really meeting to talk about removing Khameni, then that is potentially a bombshell.

I'm not saying it changes the make-up of Iran dramatically, but it has to be seen as at least a minor "victory" for a potential revolution.

I noticed a reporter mention that they may be trying to bluff Khameni into booting Ahmini as well and changing the election results. That's certainly possible.

Looks like the leaders are working to find the right scapegoat to fall. Which, I think, is smarter for them than to start cracking skulls in a major way.

Note that Rafsanjani was the president of Iran from 1989 to 1997. He lost to Ahmadinejad in the 2005 elections, and they really aren't the best of buddies. They've been sniping each other from afar, with Ahmadinejad calling Rafsanjani's presidency a corrupt one.

His election in '07 to the Assembly of Experts was seen as a blow to Ahmadinejad's supporters.

Six footballers have green armbands on for their World Cup Qualifying match against South Korea.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | New protests over Iran elections

If anything, this is a move to force Kahmenei to dennounce Ahmadinejad's election victory.

Yup.

I think given the situation where it is, this is potentially a very smart move. If you can find a big enough scapegoat, you can maybe come out without a full-blown revolution.

That being said - forcing their hand like this at least weakens them a bit.

+1

Not really sure how reliable the source, but interesting read on other happenings in Iran politics on this election.

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

love to see them actually get a fair election.


shit - i'd really love to see them appeal to the international community and get UN vote monitors in there like they do in African countries as such. That'd be a huge step. Not sure it will come to that, but that'd be best-case.

In today's articles, several sites were discussing this move by the world community. The comments from Tehran were that the move to make all accounts appear to be in Tehran really slowed down the crackdown on people who were in Tehran and were sending out messages. Amazing how something that simple threw the scent off many of the people posting within Tehran.

that's good. i certainly would have done so myself and contributed to the noise if i was signed up for twitter.

i wasn't trying to sound like i was whining or anything - just saying that it made it hard on our end to sort through things and find what amounted to the more "newsy" tweets. but if that's the price to pay for their freedom, it's fine by me.

Well, you know it was coming. Just saw CNN announce that Ahmedinejad is accusing the US of intolerable meddling... blah blah blah.

Any chance of that claim getting any kind of traction? I can see his supporters picking up the cry, but he has more detractors than supporters now.

Exactly. Without a really strong statement from the US about taking sides, Ahmedinejad is screwed, both at home and in the international community.

Of course, it appears Russia has legitimized his election victory by accepting him as a head of state.

"By not meddling, the United States has kept me from being able to accuse them of meddling. Which means that they are meddling by not meddling. If they had meddled, then they would not be trying to keep me from saying that they are meddling, which is really the worst kind of meddling that you can do."

What the fuck is wrong with Russia?

Do they ever get anything right?

short answer - no

longer answer - I could probably write a 20 page paper still about the causes of that, but still no

They do pretty well with vodka and petruskha dolls.

gah. russian vodka is ghastly compared to some of the newer designer-vodka. you could use it to strip the paint off walls!

Vodka is vodka for the most part.

nooooooooooooooooooooooo

no way! is this the view of an informed vodka drinker, or an admitted-neophyte?

View of a guy who tended bar for five years.

and drank a lot of vodka?

The difference between good vodka and bad vodka (read: Popov) is quite enormous.

mmhmm

But the difference between good and mid-range is much, much slimmer than other liquors.

good vodka you can sip like water and with a straight face.

bad vodka you shoot down and grimace after you swallow it.

this on the other hand may be true.

and how'd we get here from Iran?

Well not much news out of Iran, and like others have said the hashs at twitter are unreadable now.

All I know about vodka is that my parents would buy this big bottle of it... but it was a plastic bottle. And that stuff made be cringe to just smell.

that is bad vodka

The guy who apprenticed me bartending was a big scotch and whiskey snob. He used to really get a kick out of filling the empty Grey Goose, Belvedere, etc. bottles with the well vodka because he knew that he could get away with it (incidentally which I found abhorrent, but wasn't in much position to argue). Couldn't do that with many other liquors.

depends on who you're serving it to and whether they drink it straight or it's mixed in.

me i drink it straight and i could tell grey goose from anything else blindfolded

Mrs. A's parents used to have a grapefruit tree. The best and most refreshing drink that I have ever had is ice cold fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and Grey Goose.

Are you sure it wasn't because you were drunk?

Big plastic bottle is what Popov would come in. That stuff was horrible.

But when you're a poor college student.... (Not me, but a few people I knew would buy that. But I bought the cheap stuff of other kinds of liquor so I understood)

One of my best friends has drank cheap Vodka every day for the last 7-8 years.

In college we would buy this big plastic jug of a brand called "Budget Vodka". Their logo was a guy holding up a fistfull of dollars.

Net net they are still going to try and blow us up, so what difference does it make?

It appears that today's rally will be attended by Mousavi and it's expected to be the biggest rally thus far.

I'm really not sure that the violence by the religious police is achieving the purpose that they think it is at this point. The protesters are killing with kindness at this point. It's amazing to watch.

I think incremental steps towards a truly open political process in Iran would be a good thing for us. A lot of anti-Americanism in the Middle East is fomented by regimes trying to remain in power by focusing the anger of their people outward. If that piece is missing I think it will be a positive thing overall. Think of it as baby steps.

Reza Aslan appeared on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show last night, and laid out the importance of what is going to happen:

What's really fascinating about what's happening right now in 2009 is that it looks a lot like what was happening in 1979. And there's a very simple reason for that. The same people are in charge -- I mean, Mousavi, Rafsanjani, Khatami, Medhi Karroubi, the other reformist candidate -- these were all the original revolutionaries who brought down the Shah to begin with, so they know how to do this right.

And so what you're going to see tomorrow is something that was pulled exactly out of the playbook of 1979, which is that you have these massive mourning rallies, where you mourn the deaths of those who were martyred in the cause of freedom. And these things tend to get a little bit out of control, they often result in even more violence by the security forces and even more deaths, which then requires another mourning rally which is even larger, which then requires more violence from the government, and this just becomes an ongoing snowball that can't be stopped.

That's how the Shah was removed from power, was these mourning ceremonies. And so Mousavi very smartly calling for an official -- not a rally -- but an official day of mourning tomorrow. I think we're going to see crowds that we haven't even begun to see yet, and then follow that, on Friday, which is sort of the Muslim sabbath, the day of prayer, which is a traditionally a day of gathering anyway. This is just beginning, Rachel, this is just the beginning.

Maddow had a pair of segments last night on Iran that were quite good.

SI

I had a roommate who did that, too.

SI

Reza's interview is around 11 minutes in.

Oh, and I feel a little bad about this but about half the time I hear news on Iran, this little clip goes through my head:

Marge: Can we get rid of this Ayatollah T-shirt? Khomeini died years ago.
Homer: But, Marge! It works on *any* Ayatollah: Ayatollah Nakhbadeh, Ayatollah Zahedi...even as we speak, Ayatollah Razmada and his cadre of fanatics are consolidating their power.

SI

:D

In an attempt to change the subject, the Iranian government is claiming it thwarted a terrorist plot led by external enemies (Israel) on election day.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/DAH850653.htm

And that's why they felt it was necessary to rig the vote.

Is it me, or does this government just seem to be behind one step (or two) at every turn? That tactic should have been used early on. At this point, few will see it as anything other than desparate.

"The 'U.S. meddling' angle didn't work yesterday. Let's go for the 'Israel hates us' angle today."

I <3 this post.

I think the Iranian government is underestimating the ability of many of the Iranian people, but there will be millions who believe what the government says... no matter how outrageous it seems to us.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the reaction of the Iranian government is that it (for now anyway) seems completely uninterested in world opinion. "The whole world is watching" really doesn't matter if you don't mind the world watching you crack skulls.

Yeah, that's turned out pretty well for the ruling classes in Burma, China, North Korea - Saddam didn't have any problems when he was merely committing genocide against the Kurds and Shia. The only hope relies on either Rafsanjani/Montazeri effecting a coup of Khamenei/Ahmadinejad or with the IRGC refusing to fire when ordered and effectively switching sides.

I'm also not sold on the angle that Obama shouldn't be vocally supporting the protestors. Not to the point where I think he's in the wrong or a coward, but it's been pointed out that Bush's words in Lebanon certainly didn't do any harm if not actually helping the situation. So any commentators/posters wasting time arguing that conservative people are idiots and the protests would immediately be accepted by the population as American stooges (particularly since Ahmadinejad's supporters already claim/believe this, and it's pretty hard to convince the millions marching/supporting the other side that they are puppets) is as dumb as the conservative pundits saying Obama is selling out the Iranian people.

There is deep-seeded hatred towards America in Iran. Rafsanjani, Mousavi, and all the revolutionaries were among the leaders of the anti-American and anti-Shah rebellion in 1979. To be branded as being overtly supported by America would be a severe blow to what they look to accomplish.

Win, lose, or draw, Iran's foreign relations won't be drastically different with Mousavi or Ahmadinejad at the helm. But having moderate reformists like Mousavi MIGHT nudge the Islamic Republic towards a much more isolationist policy than a hostile one.

It probably can't get any worse than Ahmadinejad.

Photos from today's rally.

Flickr: mousavi1388's Photostream

This video seems worth sharing.

To me, there is something much more powerful about the silence than I would have expected.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Opposition supporters march in Tehran

Where the heck do you get a 100 foot green banner like that?

Edit: Actually, it looks like it might be much longer than that.

Khamenei has rejected the issue of vote fraud and has backed Ahmedinejad fully.

This is either the end, or just the beginning.

There were all kinds of weird things coming out of his mouth.

I do think at this point the fate of Khamenei is tied to that of Ahmadinejad. If one goes down, so does the other.

"YOU CANNOT SAY THERE IS FRAUD, THE DIFFERENCE IS 11 MILLION VOTES!" The fact that the difference is 11 million votes, and that ALL the handwritten votes were counted in under two hours... Heck, it take us almost two weeks to count and canvass the handwritten votes here in the Philippines.